silverorange stuff

The Not For Tourists Guide is part of a series of guide books for US cities that includes Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington. All of the guides come in a beautiful matte black design with a very sturdy cover and nice touches like rounded corners and an elastic that either holds the cover shut or saves your page.

The guide is essentially a series of maps with highlighted locations on them. Most maps have two versions, one with practical locations (banks, grocery stores) and another with cool places to go (cafes, restaurants, theatres). The maps themselves are perfect. They're clear, clean, have nice type-setting for the street names, and have public transportation nicely included to make finding the best El stop easy (bus routes aren't included though).

The worst part - almost a deal-breaker, but not quite - of the guides is the way the locations are identified on the maps. Rather than having a numbering system or codes to line up the list of locations with their address on the map, you're only given the street number and a little icon to tell you if it's a cafe or a bank. If there are ten shops on one street (which is often the case), you basically have to figure out which one has the lowest street number and then guess which spot might be the one you're looking for. I usually resort to using Google Maps to double-check before I leave, but if you're out already, you're left guessing. Soooo annoying.

As a street map, the NFT is much better than anything else I've seen. As for locating its attractions, that's another matter. That said, I'd still buy one for LA when I visit just to have a handy, sturdy, well designed map in my bag.